A collective portrait of potential clients of a modern optical salon. Consumer portrait, example of portraits of potential buyers. How to create a portrait of your target audience

Buyer persona, Client portrait, Character, Target audience - these synonymous expressions are used to describe an imaginary, generalized image of an ideal potential buyer.

A clear definition of the customer profile is critical to successful marketing, sales, product development and service delivery. This is one of the first tasks that needs to be completed, since the requirements for the store depend on the target audience and its preferences. There is a famous phrase: “You can’t hit a target you haven’t set.” This accurately describes how important it is to have a clear portrait of the client.

Why do you need a client portrait?

A deep understanding of a clearly defined customer profile helps:

Determine where they spend their time, and therefore understand where the presence and activity of the business is necessary.
Advertise more effectively. Money will be invested more wisely if you know where and to whom to advertise, thereby ensuring maximum impact on potential customers.
Make advertising materials closer to the client, thanks to a better understanding of his problems, joys, desires and needs.
Provide better quality products/services and develop them so that customer behaviour, needs and problems can be anticipated.

Also the client's portrait is key stage when drawing up a marketing plan.

Creating a client portrait

Obviously, it is important to have a clearly defined customer persona, and the question is how to create it. The good news is that creating your ideal customer persona is easy if you ask the right questions.

What are the right questions? To find out, just download complete guide, which will help you create your own client portrait. This guide will help you collect all the information, knowledge, experience and research results in a beautiful and presentable format.

Take a look at our guide to creating customer personas and begin your journey to successful marketing, sales, product development and service delivery that fully satisfies your target audience.

There may be several portraits of an ideal buyer

Sometimes a customer image is not enough. In fact, most companies have more than one ideal customer, especially if they offer multiple products/services. The best way determine their portraits - deal with each in turn. It is recommended to start with the one that brings the most benefits to the business (logical, right?).

During this process, you may also come to the realization that one business is trying to cover too much, and it would be better to narrow its specifics to occupy a certain niche, and there already offer its best products/services to customers.

Portrait of a negative client

Creating a negative portrait can be just as useful as creating a simple image of the client. A negative portrait is a generalized image of a person whom you would not want to have as a client.

Sometimes it becomes easier to decide which clients you want to serve if you understand which ones you don’t want to serve. Here it is recommended to imagine an image of a client who would be a complete disaster for the business, and record all the reasons that would lead to failure in the relationship.

The main thing is to focus not on personal qualities that make this person difficult to work with, but on those things that make a certain product or service unsuitable for him (for example, the price is too high, the possibility of increasing customer churn, or there are not enough conditions for in order to achieve long-term success).

What data should be in the client portrait

1. Demographic indicators. Age, gender, education, income level, marital status, occupation, religion, approximate family size. These things are usually the easiest to determine.

2. Psychographic indicators. They are more complex and require a deeper understanding of their customers. These indicators are based on values, attitudes, interests and lifestyle. For example: the client leads healthy image life, values time spent with family, suffers from a lack of free time and uses Pinterest to make things at home.

3. The name of the image will help humanize its profile. If the target audience includes both men and women, you can choose both a masculine and feminine name.

4. A face for the profile will help visualize it. On the Internet you can find stock photos that are associated with the image.

5. Creation of a dossier. The dossier is a page that contains all the information about the image, including name, data, photo and history about it.

6. Writing a story about your client profile. This story should tell the story of the portrait's relationship with the company and its product/service. What was he thinking about before purchasing the product? How did he feel? Why did he feel this way? What was he looking for? How did he hope to solve his problem? What did he want to achieve? How did he find/learn about the company? How did he feel after he bought the product/used the service?

Examples of tables and templates for creating a client portrait

Portrait Demographics

Portrait interests

Business and industry (architecture, banking, business, construction, design)
Entertainment (games, activities, movies, music, reading, television)
Family and relationships (short-term relationships, serious relationship, marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, raising children, wedding)
Health and wellness (bodybuilding, dieting, physical exercise, meditation, healthy eating, exercises in the gym)
Food and drink (alcoholic drinks, cooking, food, restaurants)
Hobbies and activities (art and music, gardening, pets, travel, vehicles)
Sports activities
Other

Portrait behavior

General information about the portrait

Ready-made example of an ideal client

Victoria - individual entrepreneur, she is a little over 35, she has been in business for more than 1 year. Victoria works alone and manages all parts of her business.

Victoria enjoys working with people and loves what she does, but she sees her dream of freedom, mobility and control over her life getting further away every day. She enjoys owning her own business and it gives her some mobility, but she feels like her business controls and manages her rather than the other way around.

Victoria is quite successful and earns about 100,000 a month, but she has to spend less time doing what she likes and more time on the business side of the business. Victoria is already too overloaded with the daily responsibilities of her business - but nevertheless, she wants to develop. Her business is no longer profitable because she has to do things that she is not very good at.

Victoria sees the prospect of becoming a major entrepreneur and hiring a team of people who will do things that she cannot and does not want to do, as well as automate routine work that takes up too much time.

She is ready to focus entirely on marketing. Victoria is well aware that marketing and comprehensive measures can take her business to the next level. Her goal is to increase income, create systems and expand business. By implementing these strategies, she can earn enough money to hire staff and provide stability.

conclusions

Actually basic level, creating a portrait of an ideal client will help a business become more effective. Combining customer persona with marketing strategy - the best option for rapid business development. Here are a few things to do when creating a client persona:

First of all, create a negative portrait to clarify which consumers you do not want to deal with and which ones will not be suitable for this product/service.
Give your client's portrait a name, appearance, and personal story to bring it to life. You need to be as specific as possible: the more details, the better.
Create one portrait, and if you want to make several more.
Create a portrait based on market research and customer feedback, rather than your own opinions and impressions.

Generator of new clients. 99 ways to attract buyers en masse Nikolay Sergeevich Mrochkovsky

Portrait of a potential client

The decision to purchase is always made by people, regardless of the type of market - the market is B2B or B2C.

It is important to understand WHO these people are and WHY they buy a certain product.

The same product can be purchased by the most different people and according to various reasons Therefore, successful marketing requires a criterion for searching and selecting potential clients.

The main reason for purchasing is ALWAYS DESIRE (wanting), therefore the most important sign of determination (union) potential buyers is the similarity of their desires and/or PROBLEMS that they want to solve.

People with similar desires and/or problems that the company has the opportunity to reach and offer them a solution in the form of a product constitute the desired part of the market, or niche.

To make it clearer, let's look at this using the example of a portrait of a potential buyer.

The easiest way to figure out a portrait of a potential client is with the help of Compass. This is a slightly modified Stephen Pearce model that has been successfully applied in many companies we have worked with and in several of our trainings. And it always gives good results.

What is this model?

If you draw a potential buyer on a sheet of paper in the center, and draw arrows from him to the left, right, up and down, then these arrows along with their symbols similar to the cardinal directions symbols on a compass.

Therefore, the model was called “Compass”.

Compass portrait of a potential client from the training “5 steps to great selling texts for your website” www.lnfoPraktik.Ru/5steps

Rice. 2. Client portrait compass

The Wish block is the desires of our potential client.

Common desires are the most important sign, which can unite people. You are working with a certain market, a niche, and this niche includes people with similar desires.

In order to achieve their desires, people usually need to do something. This is determined by the component Needs - necessary, necessary.

All this does not happen in the air, but against the background of Experience - a certain experience: how a person has already achieved what he wants, or not achieved, what feelings he has had about this, and in general, how he feels about it.

There is another important part - this is the problem. A problem is a contradiction between what a person wants and what he actually needs to achieve what he wants.

If your Solution, your products or services help a person achieve what he wants, give him what he needs, resolve a contradiction taking into account his life experience, then everything will be fine - your product will find its consumer quite easily.

To make it more clear, let's look at examples.

Example 1

The market (niche) is people who want to quit smoking. It is easy to combine them on this basis. Some goods and services are already being produced for them. They have a desire to quit smoking.

What is really needed for this? To do this, you need to stop buying and smoking cigarettes.

What kind of life experience due to this?

Smoking helps relieve stress and calm down. Someone tried to quit, but they are drawn to it again. Someone suffers from the fact that they are aware of the dangers of smoking, and from the fact that it is inconvenient for them to be in places where smoking is prohibited.

Thus, a contradiction arises: you want to quit, but at the same time you want to continue smoking.

One solution is e-Sigs, which allow you to quit smoking without actually quitting. The person still puts some kind of cigarette simulator in his mouth and can give up regular cigarettes.

Example 2

Another common example that can be used to illustrate the compass portrait is the market of people who want to lose weight.

To lose weight, most often you need to eat less and move more. But this is precisely what those who want to lose weight most often do not want.

So there is a contradiction.

If you found a product that would allow these people to maintain their previous lifestyle: eat whatever they want, move little, but at the same time allow them to lose weight, then such a product would be in demand.

This is precisely what the demand for weight loss techniques that you have probably seen is based on. “Don’t eat these three foods and you’ll lose weight without changing your lifestyle.”

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Before the start. Let's immediately agree on terminology so that there are no questions or misunderstandings.

Buyer Persona = Buyer Persona = Persona

I use all three definitions as absolute synonyms. All of them appear in the article in a meaning that I will define a little later. The term is also widely used in marketing client avatar.

Let's start with why you need all this.

What is a buyer persona for?

In short - to improve communication with customers and sell more and more quality.

The buyer persona allows you to better understand customers - their motivations, expectations and real reasons for cooperation, psychology - and makes it possible, based on this information, to build a marketing and sales strategy in such a way as to better satisfy needs and build long-term relationships.

Definition and a little theory

A buyer persona is a detailed portrait of your ideal client.

I immediately wanted to highlight the key words in the definition itself, but I realized that I would have to italicize the entire line. Therefore, once again about the key points:

detailed
portrait
ideal
client.

Let's start with ideals. Remember the Pareto principle? So, ideal customers are the same 20% of your clients who provide 80% of all profits. If you divide this 20% by five, you can identify a group of 4% of customers who will provide more than 60% of the profit of the entire company. These are the elite among your clients. Based on the study of these small groups, buyer personas are developed.

Detail and completeness of description is an important criterion for a character. How fully you develop and describe your ideal customer will determine how well the buyer persona you develop will match reality (and surprise, not match your expectations).

In the process of developing a buyer persona, you will sooner or later encounter a paradox: your ideas about ideal clients will diverge from the data that you receive during an objective analysis. Just be prepared for it. And a little later we will tell you how to live with it and what to do.

Here are some examples of what persona profiles might look like, developed by our colleagues at Hubspot.

If you look at the examples above, you will see that the buyer persona consists of two elements.

The portrait itself is a photograph, a visualization of the person you are dealing with.
History is a story about a person, a description of his achievements, goals, pains, principles - everything that influences the decision to start or continue cooperation.

Take a closer look at Mary, Ollie and Erin - these are not some abstractions, but living people. You understand that Mary and Ollie will immediately buy a little to try, but if they see the result, they will order more and more. At the same time, Mary will ask questions more often and be interested in technology, and Ollie will simply count the profits and give part of it to you. But Erin, with the same sweet smile, will have you for a long time and tediously before paying a lot of money at once. Already at this stage you can see how you can change your sales and marketing strategy, what scripts to prepare for each type of client and optimize your work with them.

Here is an example from Russian practice, which was kindly provided by UXpresso.

How to create a character for your business?

Nothing could be easier! In fact, this is painstaking and intellectual work. It begins with an analysis, the purpose of which is to find those very ideal clients that we wrote about above.

So what does it take?

Raise the accounting department and find out which of the existing clients pays more/longer/more often/more accurately.
Survey sales and customer service department employees, ask them to select 3-5 best clients and justify their choice.
Compare two lists and choose those whom both your accountant and employees consider ideal. The accountant, of course, has priority, because a bank account statement is, by definition, more objective than people’s judgments.

The first surprise will await you here. Because your opinion of ideal clients, the opinion of accounting and employees may differ greatly.

Yes, the accountant and managers may hate your distant relative with whom you have worked from the very beginning, go fishing with and who likes to tell stories on the phone for a long time, but is in no hurry to pay the bills. And vice versa, give excellent characteristics to clients whom you have never seen, and they pay carefully and do not ask stupid questions.

What to do about it? Accept, believe and continue to work with objective information - to create a real portrait of the buyer, and not paint with broad strokes of dreams and abstractions.

The sample of clients at this stage will be larger than the 1-2-3 characters we need. Even if you have a young and small company, there will be at least 10-15 people with whom you are pleased and comfortable to work. This is fine. Now it's time for the next stage.

We study, compare, weed out and combine

For each client we analyze, we need to create a separate profile. We already have some of the information: financial reports and employee reviews - we just need to distribute it according to client profiles. But this is not enough.

We still have a lot to find out. Below is a sample list of what you need to learn about clients.

Working information

Information about the company (size, financial indicators, type, industry).
The person’s position in the company (position, number of subordinates).

Demographics

Age.
Income level (specific figure).
Place of residence, living conditions.
Education.
Family.

Goals, fears, objections

The main goal is as your client.
Secondary goal.
How do you help achieve these goals?
The main fear associated with your product (not abstract).
Other fears.
How do you solve these problems?
The main objections to cooperation with you.
How do you address these objections?

Values

Core values.
Why did the client choose you?

Now comes the fun part: how to get this information?

Studying customer profiles in in social networks. We add all the necessary data to the profile. Don't forget about photography.
We extract information from any open sources: interviews, blogs, corporate newsletters, activity on forums - anything can be useful for developing a portrait. Don’t forget to lovingly store everything you find in your profile.
We call and interview clients on items for which you have not found information in open sources. No matter how great the temptation to write questions by letter, do not give in to it and call. Because you can wait an indecently long time for a response to a letter, and the image that the client describes after his thoughts will be very different from the Vasily or Evgeniy with whom you communicate and make deals live. After all, people tend to want to show themselves off the best side- It’s more difficult to do this in conversation.

Typically, these three steps provide enough information to create a comparison table and move on to the next step. Some clients will drop out after a detailed study of their history - this is also normal.

Now we only need to compare clients, highlight the most similar features and “grow” the types together. This is much easier to do than it seems, because when all the information is before your eyes, everything becomes clearer and forms an understandable picture.

All that remains is to beautifully compose the information, and the portrait of your buyer is ready.

For small companies Usually one or two characters are enough. Larger companies that work with different market segments usually need more portraits: corporate clients (B2B), government agencies(B2G), private individuals (B2C). Obviously, in this case, one character is not enough, so portraits can be created for each direction.

What to do next?

In the process of developing a buyer persona, you will begin to take a fresh look at both the process of communication with the client and all business processes in general. Now you need to go through several consistent steps so that the need for change is obvious not only to you, but also to other employees.

Introduce your staff to the character. Explain who this is and how he will help you communicate better with customers and sell more effectively.
Print the portrait in good quality and give several copies to each employee. In the American office of Hubspot they went further and made life-size figures from plastic, which they then placed in the office.
Conduct a survey to find out what each employee would change in their work to make communication with customers more effective.

Once staff understand the buyer persona, larger changes can begin.

Change sales scripts and introduce new models of communication with clients.
Rebuild the price and product line so that it more closely matches the character's expectations.
Change business processes with a focus on the interests, priorities and needs of the character - different characters.
Implement dozens of small improvements that will help you better understand the client and better meet their needs.
Create an effective content strategy that will be focused on the character, and not on the talents, quirks and skills of a full-time or freelance copywriter.

Finally: more about the content

There is a myth floating around the copywriting community that “you need to write in such a way that your mother can read the text.”

But let's be honest: how much does your mother have in common with the deputy production director who is looking for contractors to service CNC metal-cutting machines? Or with the marketing director of a large IT company who urgently needs to launch advertising on LinkedIn? Or at least with the owner of the online store women's accessories looking for new suppliers?

The fact of the matter is that no.

The buyer persona makes it possible to evaluate the content strategy and the content created as part of its implementation from the perspective of your client. Does he need it? What problems does it solve? How does it fit into his picture of the world? Is it in line with its goals and priorities?

Character focus allows you to create useful, in-demand content. It's complicated. Template and standardized approaches do not work here. But this is incredibly interesting.

And it is very profitable in any perspective: short-term, medium-term and strategic.